No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:26:27 · Sarah Guo, Lip-Bu Tan
[00:26:27] S1: You mentioned the opportunity to make certain parts of the design and test of chips faster, cheaper, more creative with AI. Given your Cadence experience, like, do you think is most fertile? Is there anything you think is already working? [00:26:45] S0: Yeah. I think, you know, for almost fifteen years with Cadence, and I'm so happy. One of my highlight is able to find my successor, Underwood, and I train him, and he becomes super great CEO. And then he really embracing the AI, driving the agentic AI to drive more efficient. But there's a good part, I think synopsis. Sachin also tried to do that, and they have an investment from Nvidia, 2,000,000,000, I think helping him to do a lot, and he acquired Ansys to move into the whole system design. So I think all in all, they all do the best thing they can, but also some opportunity for startup to do some of the more disruptive. And then eventually, they can either go public or being acquired by both of them or Siemens to acquire them. So I think there's opportunity for all, depending on what the entrepreneurial vision. And then as long as I always have philosophy. If entrepreneur want to sell the company, and there's quicker way for exit, you don't have to lock up. You don't have to worry about quarter to quarter earning. And then some entrepreneur, from day one,
00:27:52 · Elad Gil
[00:27:52] S2: they want to go IPO. For being a VC, I think three of you, with three of us, we all VC, we support the entrepreneur, their dream, and then help them to fulfill their dream. Yeah. If you look at the different areas that you mentioned in terms of future, either product development or impact of AI on the semiconductor industry, there's companies like Periodic doing materials. There's, to your point, folks working on the EDA side and design and other aspects and sort of throughout the chain as manufacturing. Do you think that either Intel or a future semiconductor company ten years from now looks radically different from today, given AI? And if so, how?
00:28:28 · Lip-Bu Tan
[00:28:28] S0: Yeah. I think so. I think, first of all, back to, Sara, your question about capital intensive and a little bit unpredictable and cyclical. So you have to kind of put that into factor into your decision making investment. And I usually like to go in very early, put a team together. It's kind of fun to do that. I think you also do that. And then secondly, you try to find the right investor that can co partner with you. It's not just whatever the brand name firm. I usually go for the individual. And then who are the individual that really knowledgeable in this space, you can The most important to find a partner to difficult time and good time. A lot of the time people are very enjoyable working with you is a good time. When the company don't trouble, they just walk away. I like to have partner that really work through a lot of successful company. They have multiple time almost bankrupt that eventually take off. So I think it's important to find a partner willing to do that. And then the other part is look at what are the strategic investor that can help you either in manufacturing or memory connectivity or various way to add value to the company. And also have a couple of friends that are in the growth stage and also in the hedge fund, and I really enjoy them because they have a different perspective. They know about the public market. They can guide the company entrepreneur where not to go. And so those can be very helpful. So I think all in all, I think it's just fun to do that, and then just realize is that engineering for startup is like problem solving. Each step of the way, you have to find people to help you to solve the problem. And then if you trigger that, then great, next frontier to work on. And then frankly speaking, I look back, nine of the 10 company I invest, halfway, they change their business plan because market have changed. Yeah. So I like to have entrepreneur as team, not just one person. Secondly, open mind. Willing to listen and listen to getting coaching from us. And then eventually they formulate their own plan. It's not just do what they want, it's more they figure out, the best thing is you give them enough feedback, they draw their own conclusion that you exactly what you like and all different, that you can embrace is the right decision. That's kind of fun of doing startup. They get much faster.
00:30:55 · Lip-Bu Tan
So back to your question, if you look at it ten years from now, what will be the winning company? This is just my personal view. The one that articulate and laser focus on one niche area and also find the right partner and also able to scale the company. And so in some way, and back to my point about full stack, so in the way you need to have a full stack solution. And so it can be a big company, they transform themselves to be looking at big platform, like Jensen, I admire him. You know, he focused on CUDA. He focused on Illipro. I want to be a platform company. And he did it. And so in some way, you can do that. Or startup company like Anthropic, OpenAI, they find a way to do it in a bit more elegant way. They change the game, and then it startup move fast, speed of light, you can really become a dominant player. And hopefully Intel can play the role because we have the XPU, and we have the advanced packaging, and we have Foundry. If you put that all together, can build some of the purpose built silicon for different workload. I think that's where I'm going.
00:32:03 · Elad Gil, Lip-Bu Tan
[00:32:03] S2: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And I guess part of the question I was I was wondering is where you're going, and then the other part is, does it fundamentally change how you work? Because when I look in the software world, I think there's a very big shift happening right now in terms of who you hire, in terms of who you think you want on board, in terms of people managing multiple agents. And so many people now that I know are hiring people more in their thirties, forties, fifties because they're used to managing teams. And I think that transfers directly over to managing agents in terms of understanding the complexity of what to set up and the QA and everything else. And I wonder in the context of the physical world or in the context of a FAB, how you think about shifts in terms of either a team structure or capabilities or how AI layers on. And so I just wasn't sure if it's a natural slow evolution or if there's areas where there's a radical shift where it's like, oh, for materials, now we should just use these three AA models plus some chemistry or whatever it is. So that's why I was a little bit curious about [00:32:56] S0: how you [00:32:56] S2: think about the future world there.
00:32:56 · Elad Gil, Lip-Bu Tan
[00:32:56] S2: think about the future world there. [00:32:57] S0: Good question. I think, you know, as I back to that crawl, walk, and run. So I think crawl, you basically try to I recruit some of the best talent in the semiconductor industry. And then now I'm starting to look at what are the software talent I need to bring on board and in order to build a full stack. And now I'm starting to look at, you know, my average age of my team in the 40 40, 50. I need to bring in some new talent. And then so they're understanding the workload, understanding the frontier model, open source. [00:33:30] S2: Mhmm. [00:33:31] S0: That is important. So for now, then my son become my teacher now. Mhmm. Every time he invite me to go to his house, we're playing to grandkids. Mhmm. I starting to tap on him on all the AI machine learning. He's more plug in than me. So I learned a lot and then try to understand investing and then bring some of the talent to come in. So we are changing Intel. Used to be a very old legacy spreadsheet company. Now I transform it to become AI nine AI enabled using some of our design and also across all the engine all the organization embracing AI. And then so they become less less depend on the spreadsheet and label to do that, and you're gonna combine the two talent plus the best AI tool that I can use, not only for my organization, not only for my sales. And then now I starting to look at not just marketing, and now the design, and then to embrace that.